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Making Sure Your Exit Music Is Loud and Clear

Over the years, Hollywood has offered many examples of employees who’ve made dramatic exits from jobs or situations. Clockwise from top left are Jennifer Aniston as a waitress in the 1999 film “Office Space”; Tom Cruise in “Jerry Maguire” (1996)”; Edward Norton in “Fight Club” (1999); and Anne Hathaway, shown with Meryl Streep, who was playing her imperious boss, in “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006).Credit
From top left, clockwise: Van Redin/20th Century Fox; TriStar Pictures, via Photofest; 20th Century Fox, via Everett Collection; Barry Wetcher, via 20th Century Fox

WE’VE all dreamed about it at one time or another — that exquisite moment when we finally muster the courage to tell the boss what we really think.

For Greg Smith, that moment arrived last Wednesday.

As the world now knows, Mr. Smith is the young man who made one of the most spectacular exits Wall Street has ever seen. He resigned from Goldman Sachs — but he didn’t stop there. He also wrote an Op-Ed article in The New York Times, in which he contended that the culture inside Goldman was “toxic.” The bank, he said, routinely took advantage of its clients. (Goldman vigorously disagreed.)

To some, Mr. Smith was a hero — not quite Norma Rae, granted, but close enough for post-bailout Wall Street. After all, he stood up to the mighty Goldman, the Street’s version of The Man.

To others, including many inside Goldman, Mr. Smith was a whiner or worse. After collecting fat paychecks at Goldman for a dozen years, he quit in a huff and, on the way out, took a verbal swing at his former bosses and co-workers.

Why did his story hit such a nerve? Many of us have, at one time or another, longed to tell the boss where to go. We root for the Every Worker in films like “Jerry Maguire,” “Office Space” and “The Devil Wears Prada,” who, with choice words (and, sometimes, choice hand gestures) make that big exit. It seems so inspiring on the screen, but in real life, it’s usually more complicated.

Mr. Smith isn’t the only real-world employee who has made a loud goodbye. Employees at the American International Group, Google, NBC, JetBlue and other companies have, from time to time, stormed out in style.

What happens to them? Do they work in this town again? Surprisingly, perhaps, many do. But before you, like Tom Cruise in “Jerry Maguire,” go public with a mission statement like “The Things We Think and Do Not Say,” there are some lessons to consider.

Journalists seem especially prone to bridge-burning. In part, that is because they tend to carry around some volatile matches: an ego and a way with words.

It’s difficult to characterize many of these episodes in a family-friendly newspaper. In one case, in 1974, Ron Rosenbaum at The Village Voice approached his new boss, ripped up a paycheck, declared that no amount of money could keep him at the paper — and stormed off.

In lucrative industries like finance, some people who make a stink on the way out can afford to retire. Such was the case with Andrew Lahde, who announced in The Financial Times that he was closing his hedge fund because he had made enough money and was tired of dealing with “idiots.”

OTHERS have gone on to work for themselves, either out of choice or necessity. Many companies shy away from hiring people who have publicly criticized former employers. LinkedIn profiles often turn up titles like “consultant” or “entrepreneur.”

But others simply move on. In 2009, Jake DeSantis resigned from A.I.G., the insurance giant that almost collapsed during the financial crisis, and wrote a damning Op-Ed in The Times. He went on to establish a one-man microlending foundation and then join a small investment firm.

Shortly afterward he took a staff writer job at a newspaper in Memphis, where his partner had relocated. His new employer didn’t seem to mind the Gawker cause célèbre. “I think they just interpreted that as New York theatrics and hysterics,” Mr. Morgan said last week. He is now working in New York again, and says he has no regrets.

“I took an ethical stand,” Mr. Morgan said.

In select cases, people who quit jobs don’t have to worry about returning to their old career because they’ve found a new one: national celebrity.

“Afterward everyone was watching to see what this lunatic’s next move was going to be,” Mr. Slater said. He said he was immediately offered five reality TV shows, all of which he turned down because he wanted to be more selective about how he used his fame.

He now appears regularly on news programs to talk about the plight of flight attendants. He says he is also writing a memoir and is working on a “TV show, but not a reality TV show.”

Entertainment is an industry that tends to tolerate a bit of drama when it involves sought-after stars .

Such was the case with Conan O’Brien, who politely, but publicly, chewed out NBC when it moved his show to a later slot. He now has a show on TBS.

And that was not the first public resignation for “The Tonight Show.”

In 1960, Jack Paar, then the show’s host, walked off the set after NBC censored one of his jokes, declaring “there must be a better way of making a living than this.”

He returned three weeks later, saying, “Well, I have looked and there isn’t.”

AND, of course, public exits — and comebacks — aren’t limited to business and entertainment. Two years after Mr. Paar’s outburst, Richard M. Nixon, having lost California’s gubernatorial election, announced that he was giving his “last press conference.” “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” he told reporters.

A version of this article appears in print on March 18, 2012, on Page BU6 of the New York edition with the headline: Making Sure Your Exit Music Is Loud and Clear. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe